Mario Buatta brings New York humor to Huntsville Museum of Art luncheon

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - To be an interior decorator, you have to have more skills than to know how to put together a room. You have to be an actor, a psychologist and a lawyer as well, famed New York designer Mario Buatta told a packed room at today’s Huntsville Museum of Art Gala luncheon.

“You have to be an actor to make (your clients) believe you like them; you have to be a psychologist to figure out why they don’t like chintz or blue; and you have to be a lawyer to collect their bill after you send it to them,” Buatta said in his take-no-prisoner’s style of humor.

After a 50-year career decorating the homes of the rich and famous, from Barbara Walters to Mariah Carey, Buatta has seen a lot. He’s decorated apartments overlooking New York’s Central Park and Blair House, the President of the United States’ official guest house. He has documented many of those works in his book, “Mario Buatta: Fifty Years of American Interior Decoration,” from which he showed slides of at today’s luncheon.

As Buatta clicked through the images from his presentation, he read from notes on tattered pages taped together. He began his talk by throwing, with flourish, that scroll of papers over the edge of the podium. Here are some of the fun and sometimes odd things he shared:

- One of his clients kept corresponding numbers on the items and the tables on which he had placed them when he decorated her home. The rooms have continued to look exactly as he created them 20 to 25 years ago.

- Buatta decorated singer Mariah Carey’s home about 10 years ago, and he includes photos of her luxurious rooms in his book. One thing you won’t see is her bed because she didn’t want people to be able to see where she slept.

- His Aunt Mary, whose love of antiques and collectibles influenced him, would sketch the clothes of the stars in the movies she saw and have someone make them for her. She favored English “Chickendale” and “Drunken Phyfe,” he said, jokingly, about styles more commonly known as Chippendale and Duncan Phyfe.

- Perhaps not to the surprise of his Huntsville audience, Buatta said he came from an “odd family. His mother was compulsively neat, and his father always read the obituary page of the “New York Times” to see if his name was printed there. “He wanted to see if he should bother getting out of bed.”

The museum’s gala week continues with a dinner and live auction on Feb. 27 and a cocktail party and silent auction on March 1. More than 175 works of art by 75 artists will be available at the auctions, the proceeds from which will benefit the museum. For more information, visit hsvmuseum.org.